Sometimes, just an article in the press will give you a lift

A couple of weeks ago, the Sunday Times published, as its lead in its "News Review", an article by a man, who 26 years ago, left our sunny shores for a life "across the pond". Last year, he returned to Britain to live, and now, aged 48, he writes about the Britain of then and now. He, more than most, can clearly see the differences between the Britain of 1985 and the Britain of today and many of his comments are uplifting. Britain is now a less class ridden society, he says, and given the violent class warfare at the time, of the miners versus the Thatcher government, one can see his point. But he saves his biggest statement on "volte face" for religion.

I quote - "What's gone of course is the C of E. Religion itself seems to have been wiped away from the cultural map in Britain in ways unimaginable in faithful America. I see the merits of secularism more clearly now. It takes constant exposure to American fundamentalism to feel relieved by the prosaic dismissal of the spiritual by the English. I wonder whether this has really truly changed. Anglicanism, as founded by the first Queen Elizabeth, was always about the blurring of doctrinal difference, the aversion to looking into others souls, the modesty of a limited spiritual imagination epitomised by the Book of Common Prayer."

Well, this article lifted my spirits no end. Being here day in and day out, one sometimes wonders whether humanism or atheism is making any progress at all, or whether we are simply banging our heads hard against the wall of entrenched religion and especially Chistianity. But here is a man who has been away for 25 years who can see real change in our society! Hoorah!

Proving Atheists Wrong with Science (!!)

Now, there are some strange things encountered by me on the web.  One often finds extremism, fundamentalism, homophobism and lots of other isms, that in a perfect world would be consigned to the rubbish bin.  However this piece of nonsense below, that I came across recently, takes some beating.

Where to start with my comments?

Well one - the writer seems to assume that there have been 6 billion people living on Earth since the first appearance of Man, which is a ludicrous statement to start with...

but the even more incredible observation seems to be that the writer has somehow conveniently forgotten that everyone, at least a couple of times a day, goes for a piss!  So when we consume these two litres a water per day, they don't stay in our body, but  flow back through the sewers, through the water treatment plants and back into the water cycle.

Someone save us from christian lunatics!

The End is still coming on 21 October, says failed Rapture pastor Harold Camping

Despite causing worldwide hilarity on 21 May, California pastor Harold Camping clearly doesn't know when he is beaten. Demonstrating the persistence we have come to expect from a man who has predicted the end of the world on three separate occasions in the past three decades, Camping, whose latest doomsday came and went without incident on Saturday, has told followers that the world will definitely end on Friday 21 October. It's a date that already featured in his apocalyptic schedule – 21 May was the date for the Rapture, when good Christians would ascend to heaven, leaving the rest of us behind to face rule by the Antichrist, with the world ending properly on 21 October. Now, following a hasty reappraisal, Camping claims that Saturday was merely a spiritual Rapture (i.e., one where absolutely nothing changed) and says we will have to wait until October for the real fireworks:

"On May 21, this last weekend, this is where the spiritual aspect of it really comes through. God again brought judgment on the world. We didn’t see any difference but God brought Judgment Day to bear upon the whole world. The whole world is under Judgment Day and it will continue right up until Oct. 21, 2011 and by that time the whole world will be destroyed."

Source: http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/